The creation of new digital music through the combination of samples of prerecorded music and sounds has become popular. Such creation has been facilitated by computer software designed specifically for the task and access, via the Internet, to vast amounts of prerecorded songs, sounds, effects, and speech. Music creation software on a computer may allow a user to select prerecorded audio files, assemble them in some order, and then save the resulting creation as a new audio file for future playback or distribution.
Typically, digital music creation has been hampered by the need for a computer system with extensive memory and processing capabilities. Extensive memory is typically required because digital music is very data intensive. For example, one common audio format for recording audio is the .WAV format used on compact discs (CDs). In order to effectively recreate analog sounds to the human ear, CDs store audio data as a sequence of 16-bit (i.e. 2-byte) “samples,” using 44,100 samples to reproduce one second of audio playback. Thus, approximately 88 kilobytes (KB) of data is required for each second of audio in this format. If two channels are used, as is common in modern stereo systems for playing music, then approximately 176 KB of audio data is required per second.
In order to manipulate the audio files that are used to create new music, music creation software often must load each constituent audio file into memory, requiring substantial available memory from the host computer. Furthermore, editing music during the creation process (e.g., cutting and pasting portions of audio and supporting undo operations) requires even more memory. If the memory is unavailable, the user may perceive the software as operating unacceptably slowly as audio data is transferred between memory, storage and back during processing. Thus, most music creation software is provided with minimum memory requirements that are extremely high in comparison to normal computing needs, which increases the cost of the computer to a digital music creator.
Furthermore, editing such large amounts of data requires a large and fast processor or the editing process will again be perceived as unacceptably slow. Such a processor represents an additional expense to the digital music creator.